2018年6月30日 星期六

Why are countries creating public random number generators?

Why are countries creating public random number generators?

In Chile, politicians resent the Comptroller General, which audits government officials to prevent corruption. The audits are supposed to be random—but scrutinized officials sometimes complain about unfair targeting. "The auditors have to convince the public they're doing their work honestly," says Alejandro Hevia, a computer scientist at the University of Chile in Santiago. Along with researchers around the world, he is developing technology that could persuade critics that audits are truly random: public random number generators.
On 10 July, Hevia's team will unveil an online random number service. Later in July, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will launch its Randomness Beacon as a permanent service, upgrading a pilot program that began in 2013. Brazil, too, is planning a beacon, by the end of 2019. All aim to improve on commercial random number generators, not only by being free, but by generating the random numbers through transparent protocols and permanently archiving them. The services could benefit everyday applications such as cryptography and lotteries—and also research. Some scientific simulation methods rely on random numbers, and clinicians could use them in drug trials to fairly assign who gets a treatment or placebo.
"We want to put randomness on the internet for people to use in whatever way they can find," says Rene Peralta, a computer scientist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, who leads the U.S. effort. "I think of it as digital infrastructure."

Clothes coated in copper nanoparticles are antibacterial

A new copper-coated fabric is just as effective as silver at killing two bugs that can cause serious infections
ECONOMIST.COM

2018年6月28日 星期四

How trees secretly talk to each other - BBC News



How trees secretly talk to each other

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals.


How trees secretly talk to each other - BBC News

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/.../how-trees-secretly-talk-to-each-other
 影片
2 時間前 - Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed theWood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals. What do plants ...

2018年6月26日 星期二

Cosmic Artists Discuss their Craft | Caltech







California Institute of Technology - Caltech


Space artists from around the world gathered at Caltech to discuss everything from cosmic virtual reality experiences to why they don't like the term "false color."


CALTECH.EDU

Cosmic Artists Discuss their Craft | Caltech
Everything from the latest virtual reality experiences in space to how to engage the public was discussed at a space visualization conference.



From June 13–15, the creators of those images—and other educational and outreach experts—met at Caltech's science and data center for astronomy, known as IPAC, to exchange tools and techniques and form new collaborations. Called AstroViz 2018, the conference was put together by the communications and education team at IPAC—the same team behind many of NASA's artist concepts, such as those depicting the seven planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope. 
"The idea was to re-establish a community of practice for astro visualization professionals," says Janice Lee, an astronomer at IPAC and an organizer of the event, which was facilitated by NASA's Universe of Learning education and outreach program. "The workshop also provided an opportunity to step back from our deadline-packed daily lives and discuss common goals and challenges in anticipation of the new era of data and discovery with the next generation of telescopes." 
In addition to attending talks, workshops, and demos—including the latest space-based virtual reality (VR) experiences—conference participants will produce a "white paper" over the next few months outlining future goals and strategies for facilitating collaborations between astronomical visualization teams.
Meeting attendees came from around the world and included representatives from NASA centers across the U.S., the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, the European Southern Observatory (ESO)—which just built a new planetarium in Munich, Germany—and many other institutions. 
The keynote speaker on the first day of the conference was Rick Sternbach, an astronomical visualization expert who has served as a production designer for the Star Trek franchise and worked on Carl Sagan's original 1980 television series Cosmos. Sternbach showed historical space artwork dating back to before there were any space missions to beam back pictures, and then talked about his own experiences working on Cosmos in the late 1970s. He and his team would build physical models of the planets—for example, their Saturn had Plexiglass rings—and then would take pictures of the models for the show. But around that same time, NASA's Voyager mission started sending back stunning pictures of the planets, changing everything they thought they knew.
"Our special effects were being obsoleted every week," said Sternbach. He explained that he and his colleagues would take in whatever scientific information they had at the time and ask, "Is this plausible, and does it look cool?" 
Robert Hurt, a visualization scientist at IPAC, says this is a common theme in their field. "You do the best you can given the current data, and then yes, sometimes you have to go back and change the artwork when more data are captured." Hurt created artwork along with multimedia producer Tim Pyle for the Spitzer TRAPPIST finding—the first known star system to host seven Earth-size planets. Hurt and Pyle ended up redoing all of their TRAPPIST artwork after Spitzer and other telescopes had gathered more precise data on their compositions. 
Other speakers at the conference talked about how hard it is to find a job title that appropriately sums up their duties. Frank Summers, an astronomer who does visualization work for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, says he invented a new job title that represents the merger of his astrophysics and visualization skills—"astrovizicist." Another speaker said he refers to himself as a "pixel farmer."
Travis Rector, an astrophotographer and astronomer at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said that the public often questions the veracity of colorful, star-studded space images. "The public is with us… but there are a lot of questions about how we do things," he said. When Rector brought up the term "false color"—most often used to describe astronomical images in which invisible wavelengths have been assigned visible colors—he got hisses from the audience. As Hurt later explained, the creators of space images prefer the term "translated color," because the colors are not randomly assigned but have scientific meaning. 
Another topic for discussion: the need to teach the public not only what astronomers know but how they know it. Lee said it can often be more challenging to explain the process leading to an exciting finding than to just show the result, but these explanations are an essential part of sharing science with the public. "It's important, particularly in this day and age, to enable the public to understand and appreciate this process of critical thinking," she says. 
A highlight of the conference was the demo session. Experts from planetariums and elsewhere showed off their latest digital space adventures, from trekking across the asteroid Vesta to flying through the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system to stargazing from Stonehenge. Some of the demos involved VR goggles and others could be experienced on websites. 
"The level of creativity and inspiration displayed at this conference was truly awesome," says Hurt. "From swapping ideas and techniques to showing off innovative ways that data can be heard or touched, we all have a lot of new tools in our arsenal for communicating the wonders of the universe."
All the conference sessions are online here.
Written by Whitney Clavin

個資保護;晶片國民身分證;【法】赤裸裸的人:大數據、隱私與窺視;Meet Jean Yang,

為阿邦取書3本,讀大數據2書中的其一:
【法】赤裸裸的人:大數據、隱私與窺視
【德】大數據時代的下半場:數據治理、驅動與變現


蘋論:金玉其外的晶片國民身分證

7981
出版時間:2018/06/26



.......內政部在欠缺明確法律授權的前提下,可否自行決定以晶片卡辨識國民身分?若僅維持辨識身分功能,根本毋須大動干戈地以晶片卡取而代之,因此,究竟政府要在這張晶片身分證上附加哪些監控功能,難道不必交代清楚並確保其不會侵害人民基本權利嗎?到底這張晶片身分證上將儲存哪些資訊,這些資訊的用途及其使用限制為何,甚至,政府究竟有無強迫人民取得晶片身分證的權力,難道不必確保其合憲合法之後才謹慎為之嗎?
尤其令人擔憂的是在這個晶片身分證體制下的資訊安全,亦即各種個人資訊究竟將受到何種程度的控管與保護的問題。即使僅以這張晶片身分證最可能整合的自然人憑證和健保卡而言,所涉及者不僅包括個人的收入、儲蓄、投資、保險、捐款、就醫、健檢和病歷等資訊的近用、揭露與流用這類敏感問題,透過晶片卡的整合功能,對於個人進行「型塑」(profile)的想像空間,更是無窮無盡。試問,身為保護資訊隱私權的民主憲政國家主人,我們真的應該毫無保留地任由國家以效率和科技為名,濫用這種人人無所遁形的手段,當作解決政府治理效能不彰的老問題嗎? 

執意採行應給說明

當政府公權力要以晶片卡這種貌似中立的科技,來提升治理效率時,我們應該特別關注的,不正是政府可以輕易透過國民身分證「一人一號」的特色,高效率且綿密廣泛地串聯個資,無聲無息地大規模型塑每個人民卻難以察覺嗎?而且,一旦建立並啟動這種控制體制,便很難煞車,若是導致侵害個人權利的結果,更是難以回復,豈能不慎?
我國執政者常舉其他國家身分識別制度與法規,說明我國改採晶片身分證制度的必要性,但這些國家的身分識別制度是否與台灣的全國性一人一號身分證相同,卻是其經常略而不談的重點。同時,這些國家的晶片卡證件主要功能為何,存放哪些資料,晶片讀取權限與時機為何,晶片內各種功能如何開啟與關閉,憑證資料庫的管理與使用等等,豈是台灣目前身分證相關法規《戶籍法》第51至第62條的簡陋程度可比?若民進黨政府執意採行國民黨執政下遭到強烈反對的晶片身分證政策這種老大哥監控政策,難道不需要給個令人心服口服的答案嗎? 




Jean Yang asked: why don't computers keep our personal data secure by default? Her innovations earned her a spot on our 2016 list of 35 Innovators under 35. See this year's list starting on June 27.


That’s why Yang created Jeeves, a programming language with privacy baked in. With Jeeves, developers don’t necessarily have to scrub personal information from their features, because Yang’s code essentially does it automatically. “It is a double hull for information leaks,” Yang says.
She has uploaded the code to open-source libraries for anyone to use. And this fall she begins as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, where she can try to get her ideas to spread further. “Giving people tools to create technology is incredibly empowering,” she says.
Patrick Doyle


****

澄社專欄:個資保護再思考(吳全峰)



歐盟「一般個資保護規定」(General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR)正式施行後,政府似才警覺我國《個人資料保護法》(《個資法》)距GDPR合致性仍有落差,並對產業之歐盟業務推廣、學術研究之跨境合作,可能產生重大影響。

未思考與歐美差異

如美國生醫學界就GDPR對生物檢體或資料跨境傳輸衝擊與跨國研究合作障礙,早有評估;但我國對類似議題──如健保資料之蒐集、處理與利用──卻未見相關檢討,可能使廣泛運用健保資料庫且與歐盟研究機構建立合作關係之生醫研究(包括台灣人體生物資料庫),面臨違反GDPR之風險。
美國聯邦最高法院於日昨之Carpenter v. United States判決亦對大數據年代下隱私權保障採嚴格標準,認為數位資訊(digital data,如行動載具所貯存之定位資訊)可能洩露詳細個人私領域資訊,並對隱私權產生侵害,故數位資訊之使用需建置正當程序保障。而該判決是否將限制以行動載具蒐集個人生物資訊並提供產業或學術利用,亦有待觀察。
然相較美國法院之審慎態度,我國政府仍將個人數位資訊視為產業發展之「資源」而非個人應受保障之「權利」,如鼓勵產業(包括設計App)將個人「健康存摺」、健保或其他開放資料串接,並透過資料挖掘重組混搭等方式增加「產值」便屬一例;惟該等允許第三方取得個人數位資料政策之隱私衝擊,卻似非政府所關心。
在GDPR實施後,欣見政府重新檢視個資保護政策,但《個資法》既有架構矛盾、體例不一問題,仍待全面重新思考並調整。
個人認為問題之一在於,我國參考美歐個資保護立法例時,往往未思考其間差異,摻雜混用不同基本概念之結果便導致後續《個資法》適用出現扞格。
舉例而言,「無從識別特定個人」可分為兩類:無從「直接」識別或無從「間接」識別。美國之去識別化(de-identification)概念通常指前者(無從直接識別),亦即將與個人可識別因素(identifiers)排除即可,故假名化(pseudonymization,指處理後資料仍可透過與其他資料對照以識別特定個人,編碼即屬之)亦屬「去識別化」工具;但歐盟之匿名化(anonymization)概念卻兼採兩者(不得直接及間接識別),且因假名化資料仍可對照回推,故被認仍屬可識別個資(GDPR前言第26段)。
但我國《個資法》就「無從識別當事人」概念(資料須達「無從識別當事人」始不受《個資法》保護),在法條用語、法務部函釋、法院判決中卻無統一定義與內涵,甚至直接橫向移植並混用美歐法規用語(如假名、匿名、編碼、代碼、隱藏部分資料、去識別、去連結),未考慮概念差異,遂導致衝突不斷。 

個資法本身問題多

如《個資法》第2條第1款與《個資法》施行細則第3條規定得與其他資料對照連結後識別特定個人之資料仍屬(得間接識別)個資,似採歐盟「匿名化」概念;但同法第17條卻又認為代碼╱編碼(仍可透過與其他資料對照連結後識別個人)非屬個人資料,似又採美國「去識別化」概念,兩者顯屬矛盾;而法務部函釋所創之「可逆之擬匿名」(指資料雖經代碼及雙向加密,但仍具個體性特徵,後為行政法院判決所採),更完全跳脫GDPR「匿名化」概念,僅是借殼上市。
而《個資法》本身即存在種種問題,更遑論要細緻處理《個資法》與其他法規範(如《人體研究法》、《人體生物資料庫管理條例》)就「無從識別特定當事人」在法律上之重大歧異。 

中央研究院法律學研究所副研究員 

2018年6月19日 星期二

Thomas Young,












MIT Technology ReviewOpenMind




Thomas Young dared to question Newton’s word and his interference experiment laid the foundations for the understanding of the double nature of light as a wave and a particle at the beginning of the 20th century. Meet one of the most prolific polymaths in history



BBVAOPENMIND.COM

Thomas Young, the Man Who Knew Too Much - OpenMind
Medicine, physics, optics, languages... Thomas Young dominated many sciences through his life and even he collaborated in interpreting the Rosetta Stone

2018年6月18日 星期一

Electrical Wire Properties of DNA Linked to Cancer | Caltech

Did you know DNA can act like an electrical wire to transport electrons? A new study shows how this process, which helps repair DNA damage, may be linked to cancer.

2018年6月17日 星期日

Meet Jia Zhu, the Innovator Under 35 who’s invented an ingenious way to get clean drinking water

What should you do if there's no clean water around? Jia Zhu developed an answer, and his innovations put him on our 2016 list of 35 young innovators. You can check out this year's list starting on June 27.